Feds want kids’ car seats to be tested for side-impact crashes

Stacy Segal checks the belts on the car seat holding her daughter, Jamie Hanson, 2. Segal is a child passenger safety specialist who helps parents ensure that their child car seats are installed properly. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration seeks to upgrade standards for child seats for children weighing up to 40 pounds to include a new test that simulates a side crash.
Janet Hostetter — St. Paul Pioneer Press

Child car seats would for the first time have to protect children from death and injury in side-impact crashes under regulations the government is proposing, The Associated Press has learned.

The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration seeks to upgrade standards for child seats for kids weighing up to 40 pounds, including a new test that simulates a side crash. The agency estimates the standards will prevent the deaths of about five children and injuries to 64 others each year.

Under the proposal, the new tests will simulate a “T-bone” crash, where the front of a vehicle moving at 30 mph strikes the side of a small passenger vehicle traveling 15 mph. The tests will position the car seat on a sled, with another sled ramming the side with the seat — rather than use actual cars, as the aim isn’t to test the crash worthiness of specific vehicles, NHTSA officials said.

Research shows that many child deaths and injuries in side-impact crashes involve a car carrying children that is stopped at an intersection, usually at a traffic light or stop sign, officials said. When the car begins to accelerate to go through the intersection, it is struck in the side by one traveling at a higher rate of speed on the cross street.

The side-impact test on car seats — the first of its kind — simulates both the acceleration of the struck vehicle and the force and angle of the vehicle’s door crushing inward toward the child. Besides using a 1-year-old-size dummy already approved under NHTSA standards, the proposed test would utilize a to-be-developed side-impact dummy representing a 3-year-old child.

“As a father of two, I know the peace of mind this proposed test will give parents,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said in a statement. The test “will give parents and car seat makers important new data on how car seats perform in side crashes.”

NHTSA Acting Administrator David Friedman called car seats “an essential tool for keeping young children safe in vehicles and have a proven track record of saving lives.”

“I think this is terrific,” said Joan Claybrook, the NHTSA administrator during the Carter administration and later president of Public Citizen. Noting that today’s passenger vehicles have eight air bags, in part to protect adults from side-impact crashes, she said, “We have an absolute moral obligation to protect children as well.”

NHTSA’s estimates of the number of lives that will be saved and injuries prevented by the new standards are “very, very conservative,” Claybrook said.

The public will have 90 days to comment on the proposed regulations after they are published this week. The regulations won’t be made final until after the agency has reviewed the comments and answered any important issues that may be raised. That can take months, and sometimes years, although NHTSA officials said they hope to move quickly.

The proposal includes giving car-seat manufacturers three years to make any adjustments to meet the requirements. That window doesn’t begin until the regulations are finalized.